Secrets and Sanity
by NobleCaliber
Summary: He tries to seal himself off from it, all of it. He went to great lengths to do so. But sometimes, he can't help breaking that seal and drowning in those memories. Closing doors doesn't lock it all away, not always. It manages to seep through the cracks.


A/N: Unfortunately, I don't own NCIS- things would be a lot different if I did.

Secondly, I cannot get enough of what they give us about Shannon and Kelly. I really just can't. I dunno, something about them and Gibbs and all of them together and seriously it gets me every time.

My thing was _what if he never moved their stuff, never boxed it up in a storage unit or sold it in a garage sale? What if he still had it?_

Don't worry, this isn't a _hey look they didn't really die _fic (Not saying I don't really want to write one- because I kind of do). I promise, they are only alive in memory and flashbacks here.

Enjoy!

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People said his house looked bigger from the outside. He told them it was because they knew about his basement, intentionally feeding them a load of bull while trying not to think about why they were right.

He could never bring himself to empty his home out of reminders of Kelly or Shannon, even some twenty years later. So while the hallway just looked unnecessarily long, it really concealed secrets.

Two secrets, to be exact.

While hidden rooms were so clichéd he almost had to laugh at himself, he wouldn't have done anything else, not even if he had to do it all over again today.

In his grief-stricken frenzy, he'd done nothing at first. No, he'd revisited those precious rooms to many times at first. What was he supposed to do? That was his wife, his baby girl that he was facing burying. His _family._

Eventually, it started to make him angry. Angry enough to kill? Absolutely. He knew he should feel ashamed- he'd taken another human life. But wasn't that only fair? That wasn't even an eye for an eye; it was more like one eye for two- and _that wasn't fair, damnit._

After his little... Trip to Mexico, he'd ripped up the baseboards lining the door and plastered over it all. The plain white of his and Shannon's door, the light pink and butterflies on Kelly's that he'd been talked into.

Looking at that damn door alone made his stomach churn- he'd hated that door with a passion. He'd tried to talk Shannon out of it, tried to talk Kelly out of it. Sometimes he could stand up to Shannon's _'Awe, c'mon, babe' _or Kelly's _'Pretty puh-leese, Daddy?' _but their pursuit of that stupid color for the door had been insistent and when they ganged up on him, he'd lost thirty seconds into dinner table intervention- and they knew it.

Until then, he'd told her she couldn't have it. Even after, he'd refused to help commit that horrible act. Shannon had done it with Kelly skipping around her ankles the whole time. He'd watched.

But what did it even matter now? He'd told her she couldn't paint her door pink to match her room then, and not a year later he was burying her- with that paint chip in her casket, just because he could.

If he could rewind, do it over again, he'd tell her yes in a heartbeat and have it done by the time she got him from school that very same day. _Christ_, he'd paint the whole house pink. Then again, if he could do it again, he'd never let them go in the first place.

But all the same, he plastered over it. With his teeth gritted, he'd thrown scoopful after scoopful onto the pink until it looked like just another part of the wall.

Then, he'd locked the windows. Bolted them, screwed them in place. Left those little girly window stickers there too- Kelly hadn't taken the Valentine's Day ones down the last time she'd left. Of course, Shannon, being the supermom that she was- had been- had taken the huge red heart Kelly had offered and put it on their own window. He'd left them all.

Most of the time, this discouraged him from losing himself in endless memories. He'd start opening the window to crawl through, then freeze solid in his tracks and ask himself _what in hell _he was doing. So he'd redo the bolts and trudge down to the basement to sand whatever boat he was working on.

But some days, every demon in hell couldn't keep him out of those rooms. Sometimes, that being apart just _killed _him. By know, he'd accepted that they were gone and never coming back. He didn't like to think about that much.

Sometimes, though, thoughts like those wouldn't go away. They spiraled around, downward, mostly.

Truth be told, he did actually own a couple power tools. They got him in faster, so he could get lost in those memories sooner, be it shuffling through Kelly's little drawer of the ribbons she'd wear in her hair or paging through the last book Shannon had been reading (He'd actually finished it for her, thank God she wasn't one for racy romance novels).

He'd sit the whole night in one of their rooms. Be it in his and Shannon's, laying on the bed with his eyes wide open or sifting through her jewelry box, or Kelly's, staring at those damn pink walls or looking through her backpack- which she'd left propped up against her little desk that sat where he bottom bunk of her bunk bed should- sitting in one of her little chairs, or sifting through her dollhouse.

Doing that didn't make it hurt less, per say. It just hurt different, it hurt better. It made him feel insane, but maybe he was anyways. Maybe his sanity had been stuffed into those caskets. Maybe it hovered just above him, however unable to reach him. Maybe it was the one who got decide what was worth keeping a sound head on his shoulders for and what wasn't. He just prayed he didn't give up the heart to fight for it.

If he wasn't sane, he couldn't do his job. And his job- his job was all he had these days. It was all he had to do. The only people he truly cared for, they were in his life because of his job. He couldn't lose his job. That meant maintaining sanity was vital to his state of employment.

Maybe all this- the memories, the trinkets, even the random objects that should hold no meaning at all- maybe that was vital to his sanity.

It was funny, in a completely demented, illogical kind of way, how even now, these people, long gone, still held his life together with that one little string that threatened to break at any given moment. The people who he'd built his life around now held the walls up around him. He'd supported his family, and now they were the ones who held him up when it all threatened to come crashing down. Eventually, hey became his reason for doing what he did. He went to war for them. Now, they were helping him fight a different kind of battle.

The never-ending fight for mental stability.


End file.
